Griswold Delaware: Man decorates home with 53,225 Christmas lights

Tuesday

Dec 17, 2013 at 12:01 AMDec 17, 2013 at 4:26 PM

When he started working at age 16, Joey Suarez helped buy Christmas decorations for his mother because he loved the holiday so much. "I told her, 'One year, when I get my own house, I'm going to cover it with lights.'" That year has come.

Jim Weiker, The Columbus Dispatch

Whenhe started working at age 16, Joey Suarez helped buy Christmas decorations for his mother because he loved the holiday so much.

"I told her, 'One year, when I get my own house, I'm going to cover it with lights.'"

That year has come.

Suarez, who will turn 31 on Wednesday, spent two months wrapping his Delaware home in 53,225 lights - the entire roof and all the walls draped in a shimmering blanket.

Strings of lights hang every 5 inches from the roof to the ground, covering even windows on the sides and back of the house.

His inspiration is unmistakable: He is a devotee of Clark Griswold, the bumbling father in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation who spends the early part of the 1989 film adorning his home with lights.

"I watch the movie throughout the year, not just the holiday season," said Suarez, who in a YouTube video dubbed his house "Griswold Delaware."

Suarez has had a few Griswold moments of his own, as when he slid down the roof in a heavy wind before being saved when his foot hit the gutter.

Suarez began decorating his home - at 167 Merriston Circle, in the MillBrook subdivision - five years ago, three years after buying it. To make the roof look snow-topped, he covered it with lights - 19,000 of them. ("I keep track of the lights as I put them up," Suarez explained.)

After posting the image on his "Griswold Delaware" Facebook page, friends asked him to blanket the rest of the house. In 2011, he completed the wrapping.

Along the way, he added a Nativity scene, a train set, snowmen, 135 candy canes and eight reindeer flying off the roof, where Santa and his sleigh can be found. All of the decorations are lighted - most of them blinking and accompanied by music.

Suarez, with the help of a roommate, installed a second electric box for the lights.

Seeking to lower his electric bill - which hit $415 last December - Suarez last year spent $900 on strands of LED lights. But he returned to conventional lights after the LED bulbs kept popping out of the sockets, forcing him to spend a week hot-gluing each bulb into place.

Neighbors in his subdivision on the west side of Delaware don't mind the nightly explosion of light and sound, Suarez said. Some even join him when he flips the switch on Thanksgiving. (The lights are on from dusk until midnight daily through Jan. 1, when Suarez starts the two-week process of removing them.)

"The kids and families in the neighborhood absolutely love it," said Suarez, who works at Honda.

Next-door neighbor Bob Bostian looks forward to the display.

"It doesn't bother us at all," said Bostian, who lives with his mother. "We think he does a great job. It's pretty."

Judging by the traffic that the lights generate, neighbors aren't the only people enjoying the fruits of Suarez's labor.

"If I leave on the weekends, it can take 10 or 15 minutes to get out of the drive," he said. "It's minivan heaven."

Delaware resident Mary Bragg, who lives about a mile away, noticed the lights a few years ago while she and her husband, Gary, were out looking at holiday displays.

"We were driving around and saw the back of Joey's house, and Gary said, 'We've got to find this.'??"

After cancer claimed her husband last year, Bragg asked Suarez whether he wanted some of Gary's handmade decorations. Suarez took three polar bears and three trees, which, along with the Nativity scene, represent the notable 2013 additions to the display.

Bragg views Suarez's house as a gift to the city.

"It's beautiful," she said. "I've been over there three times this year already. It's spectacular - just to see the kids' faces."

For Suarez, who is single and has no children, the lights capture the joy of the season.

"Some nights, I sit in my bedroom and watch out the window and watch kids looking out their cars with joy on their faces," he said. "That's what really makes me do it.

"When I switch the switch for the first time, I feel like those kids."

jweiker@dispatch.com

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